Crude talk with Joe Berlinger

Crude, a portrait of the Amazon lawsuit against Chevron. (Read TGL’s review here, and a primer on the lawsuit here.)

Trudie Styler, Sting’s wife, has personally invited all of the 6,000 Chevron employees in the Bay Area to attend, free of charge, in hopes of generating some productive conversation. Chevron has repeatedly declined invitations to for private screenings and has publicly criticized the film apparently sight unseen.

Berlinger was gracious enough to talk to me yesterday about the emotionally intense, legally complex film.

How did you get interested in the situation in Ecuador?

Stephen Donzinger, the American attorney who’s the consulting attorney in the case, came to my office. He was looking to get a filmmaker interested in the story. And as he was talking, all of my red flags started going off as to why this wasn’t something I wanted to get involved in. There’s a certain style of political, human rights advocacy film-making where a singular point of view is banged over your head repeatedly and anything that’s dissenting or ambiguous is not allowed in the film. That is the antithesis of my style. My style is, allow everyone to have their say and the larger emotional truth kind of rises to the top.

The other red flag that went off was that he was talking about this convoluted 13-year history, and I’m a cinema verite filmmaker who likes to film things in the present tense. I did not yet know about Pablo Fajardo or the judicial inspections which in the film play so beautifully. I felt like I had missed the story.

I mean, here we have a situation where it’s a Spanish language film with subtitles in a country where, you know, I had to check myself on a map where Ecuador was. I figured my audience would be equally not interested in this story, even though [Donzinger] was compelling. But, I said, “If you understand that I have tons of doubts and you want to take the time to show me around the region, sure, why not—I’ve never been to the rainforest.”

I think Stephen was just convinced that if I saw the pollution, I’d have a change of heart. And he was 100 percent correct. I was imagining this lush paradise—I later learned that the Ecuadorian Amazon is one of the few places on Earth that weathered the last ice age and therefore it’s a laboratory of plant and animal species that have yet to even be counted. If you just walk around this region, the environment has been completely assaulted. And they’re not just drilling for oil anywhere; they’re drilling for oil in paradise, being really sloppy about it, and they’re doing it where people live who’ve lived in harmony with nature for millennia. It was just heartbreaking.

All of my hesitations, my aesthetic criteria, my financial considerations starting getting chipped away at, but by the time I got back to New York, I just felt like, how can I turn my back on what I saw? But I didn’t think it was going to become a film. I still thought it would be incredibly difficult to tell this story and to sell it to people.

Do you still feel that way, having made the film, or do you feel like you managed to meet your own aesthetic standards?

I do. I started the project with doubts; I thought I’d start documenting it, and see where it went—maybe I’d just hand off footage to somebody else. I said, even if I lose money on this, I have a debt as a human being to go cover this. Once I made that decision, strangely enough, all the things I was worried about started to come together.

I met Pablo Fajardo: What a fucking great character! I mean, if it was a scripted movie, it would be improbable: An impoverished oil-field worker witnesses the devastation around him; decides to do something; pulls himself up by his bootstraps, gets educated, gets a law degree and finds himself at the center of the largest environmental lawsuit in the world against the fifth-largest company in the world. He just drips with authenticity and purpose and heroism and I was just completely blown away by the guy.

So I’m thinking: I got one good thing going for me. But then on the third trip, I went on my first inspection. And I show up and there are lawyers in jungle gear and a crush of media, and they start pontificating. And I’m like, woah, this is the present-tense thread that I thought would elude me. This was like 4 or 5 months into a commitment that I thought this could actually be a film.

Now I feel like it’s a film that fits in with my body of work.

Did you expect to have a verdict before you finished the film?

No. I think this is to the consternation of Stephen and the other plaintiffs attorneys, but one of the themes that emerged from this film was that this thing was going to go on forever. The film doesn’t really take a position in the lawsuit. That’s why I’m not afraid to have Chevron’s say, because to me, there are larger issues at play, which is what the film is about.

The first thing the film is about is that the legal structures we have to resolve these crises are inadequate: We’re in year 17 of a struggle that’s probably going to go on for another 10 or 15 years. By the time this is resolved, three generations of people will have died and suffered, and that’s too long. We open the movie with that sad song of the Cofan woman and at the end of the movie you see the Cofan people going downriver to God knows what existence—because they still have to live with this. They have to go back to that shithole that was once paradise.

We all are somewhat aware that there was an indigenous population that once roamed this land that we removed. That’s why I wanted to make this film: It emotionally hit me what I intellectually knew, which is that for the last 700 years white people have treated indigenous people shamefully, and multinational behavior in the extractive industries is just the late 20th century/early 21st century continuation of this shameful trend. That’s what the film is about: I can’t tell you if Chevron has wrapped itself up in enough legal technicalities to prevail in the lawsuit from a purely legal, technical standpoint, but clearly the moral responsibility lay at their door. There’s a moral bankruptcy to all of their arguments because this shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

One of the questions I was going to ask you was whether you think the film takes a stand on the lawsuit, but it sounds like you’re saying that it does take a stand on whose fault the situation is, but not necessarily what that means in a court of law.

It’s not only Texaco, either. I think the government has a role in it, and blind consumers have a role in it too, because I think if more people paid attention to how products are procured in our name, it should have an effect on our behavior. But the larger issue is that Texaco never should have set up a system that was designed to pollute. Whether they should be held liable from a strict definition of the law, I’m not smart enough to know.

I didn’t feel like the film weighed in on the technicality that Texaco’s liability stems from designing the system. Do you think I missed something?

I think it’s in the film. A number of times, they talk about the people who set up the system are the ones who are responsible. It’s one of the last things that you hear: As the helicopter is leaving the Amazon and you hear the media reps battle it out, the last things that’s said is that “Amazon Watch counters that this was a system that was designed to pollute, and set up by Texaco so any pollution that happened afterward is also their fault.” And that is the premise of the lawsuit. But maybe it could have been a stronger point, I don’t know.

As a filmmaker, not necessarily as the maker of this film, what insights do you have about the videotapes Chevron released purporting to show bribery?

This is all speculation because I’m not accusing anyone of anything, but I find those tapes incredibly suspicious—it feels like bad acting. At the end of the tapes, they’re talking about “Oh, if this was ever released in the New York Times.” And later, it was in the New York Times! As a filmmaker, as somebody who has made a living detecting authenticity, they struck me as incredibly inauthentic. And the fact that [Chevron is] not allowing the tapes to be verified, for me is suspicious. The filmmaker in me looks at that footage and it does not feel legit.

As someone who’s been around the world in multiple language-translation situations—and this has not been talked about it—if you actually look at the 20 minutes [of videotape], you have this American businessman who’s putting this judge in a very uncomfortable situation. The judge says a number of times, “I can’t answer that question. I’m here as a judge.” Towards the end there are a number of dumb, easy, logistical questions about how the court operates. The businessman says to [Judge Nuñez], “So Chevron is the guilty party?”; He didn’t say, “Are you going to find Chevron guilty?” I can tell you as someone who’s been in situations where I’m not in command of the language, that easily can read to the judge that he was being asked who the defendants in the case.

How do you feel about the fact that Amazon Watch and groups like it have really made this film their own?

I have mixed feelings about Amazon Watch embracing the film to the degree that it’s embraced it because I have maintained throughout the entire production period and release an arms-length relationship with everybody involved, so that the film is treated as a piece of objective journalism—because it is. It’s not just an advocacy film; it also critiques the advocacy movement: what plaintiffs have to do to press their case forward, the enlisting of celebrities. All that behind-the-scenes stuff that you don’t normally see in this kind of a film. I thought that was very important, because films that bang a singular message over your head are a passive experience for the audience and generally they preach to the converted. The message of this film is intended for people who haven’t already been converted, who want to actively engage with the material and come up with their own conclusion.

My big concern about Amazon Watch marketing the movie is that it blunts that message a little bit; it takes away from the objectivity of the film. I don’t want the audience to be confused that this film is an extension of [Amazon Watch]. But on the other hand they have a tremendous ability to leverage and audience. From a purely selfish standpoint, it’s very hard to release a movie like this and the fact that there’s an audience embracing it is very useful. I offered several times to Chevron to screen the movie, and they could have embraced the film and used it for their own purposes, too. I know that sounds kind of mercenary.

But Amazon Watch is hosting the (sold-out) premiere tonight in S.F., right?

I’ve allowed them at the San Francisco and L.A. premieres to have Amazon Watch-branded fund-raising events. At [first], I felt like the film needed to stand on its own two feet and establish itself as an objective piece of journalism. Luckily it has: In all the early press, the film was widely praised as being incredibly balanced and objective. Once I had those credentials, I loosed up a little bit.